The Visitors: Should I Laugh or Cry?

A very good friend of mine, when prompted by his company to write an article for their website based on memories of a particular event, came up with this. If you were there at that time of 'The Visitors', you may find, as I did, that it is thought provoking and brings back many memories and thoughts....if you were not there, please give it a go and it may just let you know a little of what it was like.

It is long but I hope you read it in full and 'until the end'...

"In the grip of this cold December, you and I have reason to remember...

It was a darker than usual December night. The village was under a power cut. The event at the village hall was an evening of food and spectacle, not uncommon at the time. I wasn’t to take the stage this time, my voice having extended its vocal ranges to cross every scale across the breath of any word. 1981 and 14. Fish and chips from the next door village, someone took a van. It was a Saturday night full house, common to these events. Paul sat next to me, my former conspirator in our crimes of performance, fed by the same obsession. Yet. Here we were, he at the faded end of the interest, and myself still empassioned. His new obsessions were punchier, fresher to the eye, and he viewed me as sadly out of date. 14 and out of date. I mentioned The Visitors. I had bought it that day, and the power had been around long enough for me to listen to its 38 minute entirety. He enquired out of congeniality whether it was any good, and I, forever not to hear a bad word spoken, must have praised it. The subject soon dropped and the chips served, a cold evening continued under candlelight. The last such event for me, out of date maybe, but too old now for evenings like these. Paul, a friend since nursery faded out. The Visitors stayed.

There would be many more dark evenings listening, finally to a clean copy of the album, two returned for a manufacturing error and scratches in the same two songs on both. Dark in the process of listening, by lights out and lying on the bed, and dark in the ending of the best thing ever. It never really crossed my mind that in just twelve months, ABBA would be no more.

And so, everyone finally got it. Following solo albums and musicals, 10 years later Abba Gold hit number one, repeating the feat 8 years later. With Gold and More Gold ABBA are seen as a singles group, the songs everybody knows, the karaoke, the impersonators. To me, the ABBA story is narrated by their albums, and none more so than their last full studio album, The Visitors.

Its funny to think that with my main focus in the group always being the blonde, Agnetha, The Visitors really belongs to Anni-Frid. Agnetha achieved her peak with The Winner Takes It All on the previous album Super Trouper. Agnetha’s performance on The Visitors is highlighted by two songs, One Of Us - the only effective single release and Slipping Through My Fingers. The album belongs to Frida with the opening and closing tracks and punctuated with two more.

In 1995, Melody Maker presented a small freebie book, a book about 20 rediscovered albums, and in it to my surprise was The Visitors.

‘And so, it follows, heard (as it must be, always) outside the unhelpful context of kitsch, there is some very very weird shit going on in Abba music.’ Taylor Parkes. Weird indeed. Taylor continues ‘...contrary to the received wisdom of pop-snob smirkers and the objectionable revivalists... (Abba) were never, ever, a jolly group.’

Putting the album into its time focus, both couples in the group had become divorced, Benny and Frida several months before the writing began. Bjorn remarried in the January of that year, as did Benny, a few weeks before the release.

..and suddenly the panic takes me, the sound so ominously tearing through the silence... Frida’s perfected paranoia sets the album mood with the title track, sub headed Crackin’ Up. This paranoia expressed in a depressing, claustrophobic lyric of Soviet dissidents fearing discovery, is tied to a beat that would make this one of the first Abba track remixed for the gay club market. These walls have witnessed all the anguish of humiliation and seen the hope of freedom glow in shining faces and now they’ve come to take me come to break me and yet it isn’t unexpected I have been waiting for these Visitors help me.... It is no surprise that this track didn’t make it into Mamma Mia.

The jolly opening of light stepping notes introducing Head Over Heels should have been the start to one of the groups tongue in cheek songs. The potential lost, despite a slightly jauntier lyric about a woman who believed in her method, but still jolly with a bitter tongue ...exert that will of your own, when you’re alone.... A song forever soiled to me on its dismal single release by it being constantly called 'Arse over Tit' by my school associates.

Frida’s hope and resolution at her new found situation materialises in her The Winner Takes It All, When All is Said and Done, the first of the marriage gone wrong songs, and she said ‘All my sadness was captured in that song.’ Despite this though, the song doesn’t quite carry the emotional weight of The Winner Takes It All. Frida dealt the blow of always being second to Agnetha, whose lyrics now moved her to the woman moving on (One Of Us) but still demonstrating vulnerability. Frida always seemed stronger, whereas Agnetha was presented as desperate, fragile and lonely.

It always struck at the time in that it holds the first ever mention of the word sex ...slightly worn, but dignified and not too old for sex..., the days of Dum Dum Diddle, my darling fiddle (Arrival, 1976) were long gone.

The song holds a slow release of positively, which becomes more apparent in ongoing listening, the acceptance of the situation being demonstrated as a sign of needing to move on, it is not a tragic song.

Closing side one in perfect conclusion, Soldiers returns to the theme of the opener, and the approach of darkness. A marching song bringing everyone together under the same threat ...cause if the bugler starts to play, we too must dance... and probably even more bizarre in the realm of an Abba lyric, the rise of Nazism, and the fear of uprisings amongst untrained armies.

Frida opens side two with the way forward, at least for Benny and Bjorn. I Let The Music Speak was the second time the boys had introduced the 'musical' theme into their work, the first being the four song mini musical The Girl with Golden Hair, three of which featured on 1977’s The Album. This escapist song demonstrates that not all was gloom, expressing in its narrative that enjoyment can be found in song. The music though lends the air of drama, an edge which brings a level of seriousness, and the basic ‘song from a musical’ quality. Its placement on a pop album? It could be argued that few tracks except notably the following track could be addressed as pop tracks.

'One Of Us' becomes the second song in Agnetha’s torch song trilogy, beginning with 'The Winner Takes It All', and concluding with 'The Day Before You Came'. The single woman coming to terms with her independence but still longing and regretting the decision to make the break. In the irony that exists in the songwriter being Bjorn and Agnetha the vehicle of performance, Bjorn had the power to give with one hand - I felt you kept me away from the heat and the action... - and take back with the other 'sorry for herself, feeling stupid, feeling small, wishing she had never left at all'.... Still with a heaviness of blue eye shadow, though less than The Winner Takes It All, Agnetha’s portrayal of independence moves on in this song. Her story to be concluded at the end of ABBA, no eye shadow, and with an amazing clarity in her face, 'The Day Before You Came', embarks Agnetha at the beginning of a new life, and so turns the light out on this group (literally shown in the video) and their last recorded track.

'Two For The Price Of One' retains a position as the most contentious, silly, humorous, remarkable track on the album. A vocal from Bjorn leads the listener into the world of the personal columns; a man with a dull life wishes to get a wife and is attracted by an ad which offers Two for The Price Of One. In a lyric toned down from rhyming the girls surname of Lexy to Sexy, (she became Whiting to Exciting). the kick in the tale comes that the Two is the girl and her mother. It is by the albums tone a light and frothy song with an exuberant ending of a brass band, but nonetheless disturbing for it.

The penultimate track 'Slipping Through My Fingers' is probably the group's most mature. Bjorn’s lyric about his and Agnetha’s growing daughter Linda, demonstrates that sense of time passing and all their own personal problems and the pressures of success measure as nothing to the fact that what is most precious is moving away from them by the day: ...do I really see what’s in her mind each time I think I’m close to knowing she keeps on growing slipping through my fingers all the time... Agnetha’s raw vocal and somewhat subdued accompaniment, presents a song which may make the classification of a song from a musical more so than I Let The Music Speak. Indeed the songs placement in Mamma Mia is probably the best suited in terms of the narrative of the musical and feels at home on the stage.

The pause between the last notes of Slipping Through My Fingers and the soft ticking of a metronome opening Like an Angel Passing Through My Room doesn’t seem long enough to fully gauge that really this is the end. It seems somewhat odd that there were to be six more songs before the group ‘rested’, four released the following year, one recorded but not released until eleven years later (I Am The City) and one that simply won’t go away even though no version of the song was finalised, it is some say, in the league of the classic Abba tracks, a return to form. ‘Just Like That’ has been recorded, by another Swedish group Gemini - under the wing of Bjorn and Benny, yet you cannot fail to hear Agnetha’s vocal; a song which had its place in the previews of Mamma Mia, only to be dropped because of its obscurity to the general public.

But Angel is really the end. A sparse and lonely track, with only Benny and Frida; a difficult track recorded in a number of ways from a working title of Twinkle Twinkle, you are bought coldly back to the opening of the album. Alone in a room, but now with only memory - so the present runs into the past now and then become entwined playing games within my mind... I close my eyes and my twilight images go by all too soon.

The clock ticks away the end of the song and that's it. You are presented with Bjorn’s most incisive lyric "Love was one prolonged goodbye". Fitting to bring the Abba story to an end.

A complete album? A pop album at all? Or a collection of disparate songs with the only cohesive view that hey, everything is not good in the world of Abba. Should I Laugh or Cry?, the title of the albums missing track, only securing life on the b-side of One Of Us, this track alludes to relationship problems, but with the strangest turn of lyric ...dressed in his striped pyjamas that I bought, trousers too short... and ...standing there on his toes to grow in size. All I see is a big balloon, half way up to the moon... This song offers a quirky and confident/harmonious style which may have lightened the edge of The Visitors.

In the days of vinyl, the two sides of any album created the identity along with that stamp of authority, the album sleeve. Nothing defines this album better than the front and back design. In an artists studio in Skansen, Stockholm, four people stand separated, in reality a room with no heating (despite the image looking very warm) surrounded by works of art hanging on the walls, dominated by Eros, the angel of love. Each member is distracted to the same view point, something out of shot, Agnetha being the only one taken from an activity. Is this The Visitors or is this Like An Angel Passing Through My Room? An oppressive statement equalled by the treatment of the same image for the back. There among the works of art, is the image, framed and hanging, complete and finished.

20 years on and the benefit of hindsight, brings to a once 14 year old boy, a clarity which only comes with time, a sadness for then but not for now, not for a group who despite their own experiences are still seen as jolly. A good time, had by all, except perhaps for four".

My thanks to Lindsay for agreeing to let me share this with ABBAMAIL.

ABBAMAILer Dominic 'Ice' Wallis London, UK